Sports Journal 10-6-13

[I wasn’t able to post on Friday because of an Internet outage.]

I couldn’t resist.  I watched the F1 race from Korea live at 12:30.  A.M.!  I must be more desperate for racing action than I thought.  I’m guessing it’s about noon wherever they’re having the race in South Korea.  It’s had to say with the dull, gray skies overhead.  Likewise, the area surrounding the track can be charitably described as quaintly bucolic.  Or, less politely as a valley of dry shrub grass and low hills.  The smattering of Korean-ish architecture around the track looks miserably out of place and cheap.  The track is brand new, but already looks old and worn out and in need of a wrecking ball.  Absolute fail from an F1 glamour standpoint.

From a racing standpoint, va-va-va-voom!  The track is filled with sharp turns, producing fairly close, dramatic racing.  The opening turn alone goes into a hard, long left that ends up sending the cars 180°.  Of course Vettel lead from the start, kept it up all the way, and finished in first.  No spoilers there.  You should be expecting this from him by now.  But, there were several well-fought battles for second (Hamilton, Raikkonen, and Grosjean) and for fourth (Hulkenberg, Alonso, and Hamilton). 

On tracks incidents included Button’s wing being damaged on the first lap (but he finished 8^th), Rosberg’s nose dropping on track and causing some spectacular sparking action, and Sergio Perez’s right front tire exploding.  There were also cool thermal cameras on Button’s and Webber’s cars, showing tire and engine temperature.  The later proved interesting when Webber’s car caught on fire.

The meeting in the waiting room after the race was illuminating in personalities.  Vettel was beaming with his first place finish.  Kimi was quiet and inscrutable as ever with his second place.  Grosjean was pleased and chatty in third.  I still can’t believe they let a camera in there like that, intruding on the driver’s private time.  Thanks to Uni-Mas’ continuous coverage without commercial interruption and some great racing, I was up till 3 A.M.  Thanks.

I’ve been able to catch most of the baseball playoffs so far, either on TV or radio (at least up until Sunday).  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to catch more than a few innings in any of them.  More unfortunately the TV coverage has been national broadcasts on TBS.  Not only does the coverage lack the pleasant intimacy of a team broadcast, since these are the playoffs, the announcers feel compelled to dissect every on-field moment in a grave and serious manner.  With their three-man booth crew, they end up constantly trying to out-do each other in hysterical hyperbole.  Also, there’s the directorial emphasis on “Goat” cam to highlight the players, and even fans, who make bad plays.  Overall, it’s just an unpleasant way to experience a ballgame. 

Then there’s the question of why these games are on TBS.  Since there’s no major network synergy or promotion, baseball effectively disappears for a couple weeks for the casual fan.  Why hasn’t the MLB figured this out?  If the MLB Network was on Basic Cable, I’d almost recommend putting all of the Wild Card and Division games there, at least they’d do a better job of broadcasting them, and viewers wouldn’t be complaining that Big Bang Theory reruns were being preempted.

On the radio, ESPN Radio somehow rises above their ESPN name to call a decent game.  Unfortunately, my local affiliate, KROD, on Saturday chose to put the station on autopilot and run local commercial breaks every 15 minutes, like right in the middle of innings.  If this happened during an NFL game, the station owner would be down there to fix it himself and fire some people.  During playoff baseball, however, who cares? 

I should talk about the actual games, but like I said, I haven’t gotten a good look in on any of them.  The action and results speak for themselves now.  Making predictions at this point is kind of pointless.  The only thing I’ve noticed is the continued furious drive by the media for replay to overturn umpiring “travesties,” and of course for the four-hour, nine-inning ballgame, by way of consequence.